Paul du Quenoy, ‘Honeymoon to Bayreuth’: French Appreciations of Richard Wagner in the Interwar Era

March 2011, Volume 5, Number 1, 46–64.

Nearly a year after the conclusion of the November 1918 armistice with Germany, the critic Florent Schmitt reviewed a performance by the orchestra of the Concerts Colonne, one of Paris’s premier ensembles. Reacting to the favourable reception of the programme’s Wagner excerpts, he lamented: ‘the people reclaim Wagner without much knowing why […]. I cannot but tremble in dreaming about the innumerable Lohengrin and Rienzi overtures that are in store for us […]. The war, in its only merit, has at least for a little while spared us.’